


back in old sicily

by myconstant



Category: Moonstruck (1987)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 10:43:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5453783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myconstant/pseuds/myconstant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loretta Castorini Clark gets married for the second time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	back in old sicily

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melitot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melitot/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Melitot!! This was such a joy to write and I really hope that you enjoy it. May your Yuletide be merry and bright :)

Loretta Castorini has been married before. The whole of New York knows this to be true, except for Ronny Cammareri - who knows, but sometimes acts like he doesn’t.

For example, in the early hours just after dawn when the apartment smells like fresh bread from the ovens downstairs, Loretta rolls over. The old bed creaks and Ronny mumbles in his near sleep.

“Listen,” she says. “There’s something you gotta know.”

The apartment is otherwise quiet, as are the streets outside. Loretta’s already been awake for an hour because this is the day before her second wedding and because there is a lot to think about. She also has to get back to her own house before the rest of the family wakes up, but there's still some business to manage.

“I'm here, sweetheart,” Ronny nods into his pillow, eyes still closed.

Besides possessing knowledge of her widowhood, the entire city also knows that Loretta’s previous marriage is not something that she particularly enjoys talking about. For this reason, Loretta doesn’t wait and just says, “You gotta know that me and my first man, we had bad luck.”

Ronny doesn’t appear to have much to say about this. He makes a small grumbling noise and shifts beneath the sheets. His hand comes up to rest on her hip.

“I don’t want us to have bad luck,” she adds.

“We won’t have bad luck,” Ronny mumbles, slightly more awake now.

“But how can you be sure? You can’t.”

“I won’t let us have bad luck.” This is said like a growl, fierce and protective, but that’s all it is - a noise muffled by the sheets pulled up to Ronny’s face.

“Just do me a favor and keep an eye out for buses,” Loretta tells him, getting out of bed and reaching for the robe on the floor. “You know, look both ways.”

Ronny cracks an eye open and cranes his head up. His hair is a mess, pieces sticking up here and there where they shouldn’t. In the armoire mirror, Loretta’s hair is like that too.

“Will you stay?” he asks. “The sun’s not even up. Five minutes, baby.”

Now what the whole of New York doesn’t know is that Loretta Castorini is crazy about Ronny Cammareri, the man who ruined her life and then somehow made right. It’s a good blessing that nobody knows, because Loretta doesn’t know if she could stand it if they did. At least not until tomorrow, God help her.

She takes a moment and then slides back into bed. Ronny smiles, already dipping back into sleep, and rolls towards her to press his cold feet into the crook of her leg. Loretta scowls and he smiles against her neck.

“I love you, Loretta.”

“You’re awful, but I love you too.”

And five minutes turns into two hours.

 

   
 

 

If they were getting married in New York at the big church on Sullivan Street with the high dome ceiling, loud organ, and rows of hard wood pews, where she probably would have gotten married the first time had her first man not been Presbyterian, two hours would not be that much of a problem. A brisk apology after she shows up an hour late for her appointment with the seamstress fitting her wedding dress and then a quick rushed coffee afterwards - a small pain in the neck, but not that big of a deal.

That’s if they were getting married in New York.

But they are not getting married in New York.

“Where the hell were you?” 

Loretta hears Rose before she sees her standing with Cosmo by the empty departures gate. An announcement for final boarding Flight 26 to Rome and Palermo rings shrill on the loudspeaker overhead.

“I'm sorry, Ma.”

“Mrs. Castorini,” Ronny says, carrying their two suitcases. He’s wearing a new pair of shoes, black leather and shiny, bought specially for the occasion. “You have my most sincere apologies.”

Rose looks at him critically - the suitcases, the shoes, the one tuff of hair still sticking up in the back - and says, “You might have picked a good one, Loretta.”

Cosmo’s looking at Ronny too, but instead he says, “Almost missing the plane the day before you get married?” He turns to Loretta, pointing to heaven with both hands. “I won’t say it. _I won’t say it_.”

“Then do us a favor and don’t say it,” Rose says, following Cosmo towards the gate.

“I don’t understand,” Ronny says to Loretta, shifting the weight of their bags.

Loretta groans and reaches out to help balance the luggage Ronny's hands, careful to mind the wood. “Bad luck. He means we’re already having bad luck.” She groans again. “And now I’ve gone and said that we have bad luck right before a plane ride.”

“I thought you said you don't believe in curses.”

“I don’t. Curses and bad luck are two different things.”

“Listen,” Ronny says as they board. “We have good luck because we didn’t miss this plane. We have good luck because we are getting married.”

Loretta frowns. “I’ll say we have good luck if we make it to Sicily.”

 

   
   
They do make it to Sicily.

There's some turbulence over the Atlantic and a small delay out of Rome. Cosmo’s suitcase is accidentally left on the plane but eventually retrieved, and all of Loretta’s grandfather’s dogs successfully clear immigration. It is many hours from door to door, but the feel of the springtime sun outside the airport in Palermo makes it feel closer to none.

They stay with Loretta's elderly great aunt, who, for either much better or much worse, lives right around the corner from the house where Ronny was born.

“I don’t want to see her,” Ronny decides as soon as he sees his mother's home. It is just before dusk and the street is busy with people. He is wearing his new shoes, and Loretta, her new hat.

“You’ll be happy you did later,” she says. “It’s no good to get married when there’s bad blood in the family.”

“She won’t be happy.”

“You don’t know that, and besides, we’re here to fix what’s wrong. She doesn’t have to be happy about it. You fixed things with your brother, so now you’re going to fix things with your mother.”

Ronny dwells on this.

“I’m going to fix things with my mother,” he echoes, softly at first. And then, “I’m going to fix things with my mother!”

And for better or for worse, Ronny walks across the street to the house that he was born in, to the house that his mother almost died in, and bangs on the door with his good hand. The family of starlings nesting on the windowsill take off.

“Ma!” he shouts at the upstairs window. “Ma!”

The window smacks open. A head, small and fragile and swathed with black lace, pops out. “What do you want?”

“It’s me. Your son.”

Now Loretta’s Italian is halting and slow, by no means fluent. She knows the important things - bread, thank you, get the hell out of my house - and clearly Ronny mother’s, a native of this city but also once a resident of Whitestone knows some of those in English too.

“I have no sons like you,” she says following by a string of rapid Sicilian that Loretta can't translate exactly, but doesn't need to. The window bangs shut. She thinks she gets the main idea.

Ronny glares, his fist clenching and unclenching at his side. “I told you she doesn't like me.”

Loretta shakes her head and strides forward to knock on the door. After a moment, it swings open.

Mrs. Cammareri is slight in frame, but big in stature. In her hand is an old wooden spoon.

“Who’re you?”

“Loretta Castorini.”

“I’ve heard about you.” This comes as more of an accusation than a fact.

“I’ve heard about you too,” Loretta replies. “Will you invite us in?”

Mrs. Cammareri pays no attention to her son standing next to her. Instead she makes a low guttural noise that sounds like disgust and turns to hobble slowly down the hallway. Loretta follows and eventually, Ronny too.

The house that Ronny Cammareri grew up in is dark and warm, the colors already faded from the furniture and the walls. At the end of the short hall, Ronny’s mother waits for them at the kitchen table. While Ronny eyes his childhood home with suspicion, Loretta takes a seat across from his mother.

The silence is wide and awkward.

“You know, when I first met your son,” Loretta says after a minute, “he threatened to kill himself with a big knife.”

Vesta Cammareri, seventy-six years old next September, sits back and laughs. “That’s why I bought him a one-way ticket to America and told him never to come back,” she says. And then, “He’s too like me.”

Ronny snorts.

“We’re getting married," Loretta adds.

Ronny's mother drags her chair from beneath her so it screeches against the old tile floor, pulling it close enough so that Loretta can see the veins of her eyes. Outside the window and down on the street, an accordion plays.

Mrs. Cammareri frowns and then turns to Ronny.

“You’re staying for dinner,” she says before getting up and striding quickly to the stove.

“Alright, Ma,” Ronny says, although he doesn't look away from Loretta. “Alright.”

 

   
   
She rings Johnny in Brooklyn afterwards.

“Is my mother dead?” Johnny asks before Loretta can even say hello. The way that his voice breaks over the phone is pitiful, but also makes her smile.

“Oh, she’s alive,” Loretta says. “She’s alive and not going anywhere. I’m to tell you to remember to wash your socks with the special soap.”

“Thanks, Loretta. We break our engagement and still, you look after me.”

“I kind of like her.”

“That’s good. Have you married my brother yet?”

“Tomorrow morning. And what's wrong with you, Johnny? You sound beat.”

“I couldn’t sleep last night. I was watching the moon.”

“What do you mean you were watching the moon?”

“It was big and bright, Loretta, you should see it.”

“I will in a few hours,” she says. “Ciao now, remember the special soap, bye-bye.”

And in a few hours, when she lies awake in her Aunt Roberta's house on the night before her second wedding, vaguely aware of her grandfather’s loud snoring next door and Ronny quietly playing a record from an opera she’s never heard of in his own room across the hall, Loretta looks out the window upon the city below. There’s the moon, big and bright.  
 

 

   
The day that Loretta Castorini gets married for the second time, everything is done properly.

They decide to get married in Palermo because both of their parents had gotten married in Sicily and all of their grandparents had before them. They decide to get married in the month April because it is following the holy seasons of Advent and Lent, and because the weather in Sicily is cool and pleasant, because the winds blow the right way. She goes to the big church on Sullivan Street before they leave not only to make her last confession before getting married for the second time, but to also let God know that she has thoroughly reflected on all her sins pertaining to marriage, infidelity, and accounting. She forces Ronny to go too and after great blustering reluctance, he spends nothing short of twenty-five minutes in the confessional booth.

But before she walks down the aisle of a small chapel in Sicily and becomes eternally bound to this man who was once the brother of her fiancé, Loretta fixes her veil outside the front of the church while everyone else waits inside. Her father, dressed in his best suit, watches her and then frowns before starting to pace.

“Pop, you look like you’re at a funeral,” she says.

“It smells like a funeral.”

“That’s the incense because we’re at the church. This is a wedding, not a funeral.”

“Loretta, it’s all the same.”

It is common knowledge in their part of New York that Cosmo Castorini made his small fortune not off of faulty plumbing or copper pipes, but off his natural skill in reading a face. In this respect, Loretta is absolutely Cosmo’s daughter.

She smiles. “Are you nervous for my wedding, Pop?”

Cosmo stops his pacing. “Where you gonna live?”

“At Ronny’s place. Above the bakery.”

“Why leave the house?”

Loretta pauses in the middle of smoothing out her dress. “What do you mean? You didn’t want Johnny to live in the house.”

“ _That_ was Johnny,” Cosmo says. “ _This_ is Ronny.”

“What’s going on, Pop?” she asks. “First you didn't want to pay for the wedding, now you've paid for the whole thing. Then you didn't want us in the house, and now you do. You just met the guy. How’s this about Ronny?”

“This isn’t about him,” Cosmo says, and Loretta thinks - _thinks_ \- that her father might have a tear or two in his eye. “This is about my daughter.”

Loretta tries for words, but finds nothing close.

“Ti amo,” he tells her, his hand brushing her cheek. His eyes are wet but happy, and Loretta is halfway down the aisle, her hand tucked into her father’s arm, before she looks up to see Ronny at that altar and realizes that she might be harboring those same tears too.

 

 

 

The first time Loretta Castorini got married, it was at the City Hall. It was a Tuesday and she had been wearing a grey dress with boots that had been wearing down in the sole and she hadn’t said a word to her parents until the papers were signed and what was done was done. Her first man was a good man, but not the right man, and there, she supposes, lies the difference.

When she marries Ronny Cammareri, there are bells ringing and rice thrown for good luck and all of the dogs of Palermo barking as they leave the church. There is a honeymoon in Rome and a safe trip back to New York before Ronny Cammareri moves into the house and just like that, the house becomes his and their home.

Loretta wakes up that first morning just as the sun is rising. Ronny shifts next to her in the bed.

"What's wrong?" she asks, still half-asleep.

“Back in the church," Ronny says, his voice rough. "Before we said our vows and became man and wife, your mother asked me a question.”

“What was it?”

“If I fear death.”

She cracks an eye open. Ronny is staring intently at the ceiling. "Do you?"

“I told her that I am now the happiest of men, so I’m not scared of dying. I’m not scared of anything.”

Loretta smiles. “What did she say?”

“Nothing, but she seemed pleased."

An alarm clock goes off on the bedside table and Loretta groans. It is six o'clock in the morning. Ronny chuckles and reaches to turn off the alarm. He hoists himself out of bed and moves to grab his robe.

"Stay?" Loretta asks. "Just five minutes."

And five minutes becomes an entire morning.


End file.
